Moderation is a fatal thing…
Nothing succeeds like excess
– Oscar Wilde
Extreme behaviour is a very human thing. Some people enjoy solving diabolical level Sudoku or doing 40 000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Others want to climb Everest or go flying in a wingsuit. But those sort of things can be tricky: what to do if you’re half way down, decide it’s not your bag and want to pull out?
Thank goodness then for eating and drinking, occasions when you can push your boundaries knowing that at any stage, you can either stop, or take mitigating steps. With that in mind, let’s get to the point. Whether you’re fond of a ‘wee dram’ or not, you really, really should experience Islay whisky at least once in your life. Let me explain.
Oscar Wilde was an Absinthe fiend and we probably shouldn’t be looking to him for moral guidance, but there are people on the far-flung fringes of Scotland who would totally agree with him that excess and success are inextricably linked. In this case, by something entirely natural and 100 percent vegan.
What makes Scotch (that’s whisky without an ‘e’) distinctive is that it’s traditionally made from barley that is malted (i.e. soaked, then dried out before being made into sugary porridge which is fermented) using peat-fuelled fires, and peat is really interesting stuff.
Technically, it’s bog-mud: compressed organic material that has decomposed over thousands of years. But peats, like the Scots themselves, can have very different accents depending on where they’re from. According to the WWF, peat-land makes up 20 percent of the entire Scot-land. When you burn it to dry out barley, those grains absorb clouds of pleasantly pungent smoke and things called ‘phenols’. The more you smoke, the ‘peatier’ the whisky will be.
Measured in parts per million (PPM) peatiness starts in single figures for inland whisky from regions like Speyside and starts to rise as you get closer to the coast and the whiskies get increasingly wild and salty. And if you want to wean yourself off your whisky training wheels for good, hop aboard a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry and head into the Hebrides, the shattered archipelago off Scotland’s west coast
It’s a pilgrimage I made some years back with Alan. Officially my boss, but also a great travel buddy, we’d shared some proper adventures over the years. It took all of 30 seconds to convince him that the world’s most extreme golf and whisky trip was a total no-brainer, but it would require budget approval, a lot of planning, a sense of humour and a love of the unbeaten track. All of which he was rather good at.
The itinerary read like the script for a Caledonian murder-mystery. From Glasgow, we headed Southwest to Ardrossan and boarded the ferry to Brodick on Arran. We navigated miles of insanely narrow single-track roads wondering what would happen if someone came the other way, and got lost on the Machrie Moor trying to find its megalithic standing stones, Arran’s top tourist attraction.
Then another ferry, at Lochranza, for a seven mile crossing to Claonaig on the Kintyre Peninsula to check out its famous ‘Mull of’ and taste the legendary whisky of Springbank. It’s the last known survivor from the days when Campbeltown was the whisky capital of Scotland before prohibition and depression in the 1930s pulled the plug on the party.
And finally, from the northern reaches of Argyle and Bute, after popping into Tarbert (one of the prettiest little harbours in all of Lochland), we boarded a car-eating ferry at Kennacraig for the two hour crossing to Port Askaig, gateway to the magical isle of Islay, ‘Queen of the Hebrides’.
Large in stature alone, Islay (pronounced ‘EYE-lah’) could fit into New York City and is home to 3 000 people, four fresh-water lochs and nine distilleries. And just beneath its surface lies a unique cocktail of decomposed seaweed and sphagnum moss, dune grass and myrtle. It is, quite literally, a massive lump of pure peat hanging off the end of the known world, pummeled and lashed by the salt, wind and waves of the North Atlantic. All of which leave their mark. In short, the whisky produced on Islay’s shores screams of terroir.
We’d barely settled in at our hotel when the geography lesson began. I ran a bath and clumps of peat plopped out the taps, filling the room with a curious bouquet that followed me for days. Dry, burning peat smells wonderful, in its raw state it’s decidedly feral. I lay there like a teabag in reverse, looking out at the golf links, fiendishly routed over the grassy coastal duneland known as the machair, filled with anticipation in a way that only happens when you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.
We’d been invited to the main bar for a spiritual welcome only to find a local already ensconced: his Tam o’ Shanter placed neatly on the counter and a weathered grey anorak draped around his shoulders. He had the air of a town elder who considers carefully whether or not to interact with strangers based on their accents. And it was only after the first measure of Bowmore 12 (the proprietor’s shout) that he did so.
When we told him we were golfers, from the tip of Africa, and had come to play the most extreme course in Scotland and drink its finest hooch, he must have sniffed a sense of humour above the heady aromas in his glass. ‘Well, it’s good you decided to come now, because it’s nae gonna last forever: did you know, we’re running out of peat?’ ‘What?’ I said, ‘no-one told us. That’s going to be a problem!’ ‘Aye, right’ he quipped, ‘there’s only enough left for about two thousand years!’
At the time, hilarious: a decade later, not so much. Although the whisky industry plays a tiny part in its commercial exploitation, peat has been used for centuries as fuel and, more significantly, in horticulture. But it’s also Scotland’s answer to the Amazon: a vast carbon sink, a green lung that helps the earth breath in a biodiverse way. No wonder the Scotch Whisky Association has launched something called the Peat Action Plan. It might be technically renewable but peat only grows one centimetre every 10 years. So it needs to be managed really well or future generations will have to settle for zero-parts-per million: a sad and sobering thought.
Which brings us back to Islay because there are few places on earth better suited to drowning your sorrows. Although we’d end up visiting all seven distilleries that were operational at the time, I had my sights firmly set on the south east coast and a short stretch of road that starts at the town of Port Ellen, and within the short space of three kilometres, leads to my three favourite whiskies in all the world.
While the distilleries in the north like Bowmore are relatively light smokers, kicking off at the 25ppm mark or less, the southern superheroes of Laphroaig (pronounced ‘la-FROIG’) and Lagavulin will push it to 35ppm. Ardbeg tops out nearer 50ppm. The result is quite simply like nothing else on earth. These whiskies taste primal. They are briny, earthy, metallic and smoky: like medicinal preparations concocted by druids. I once poured a snifter for my friend Paul who, although a whisky fan, hadn’t ventured much further than Justerini & Brooks and his reaction was beautiful. ‘Oh my God’, he said, ‘I feel like you’ve just hit me in the face with a smoking braai log.’
I’ve been many places that have stirred strong emotions, from the Colosseum to the Drakensberg, and standing inside the kiln at Laphroig is right up there. Everything reeks of peat, from the barrels standing idle in the shadow of the chimneys to the majestic copper pot stills at the heart of the operation, to their private water source, the Kilbride stream, naturally filtered through peaty bog soils. But standing in that room, on the banks of Loch Laphroig, where malted barley gets a kiss of life, you feel like every cell in your body is being infused with 200 years of peatiness and life will never be the same.
Islay malts were very much on my drinks list before I visited, but that trip gave me an entirely new perspective. I always enjoyed comparing the sweetness of Bourbon, the smoothness of Irish and the rawness of Canadian Rye, but it was only after overdosing on phenols that I totally got Scotch. Rule #1 of hedonism: you can only truly know your preference if you’ve experience the extremes.
Best of all, you don’t need to climb mountains to satisfy your thirst because Scotland exports 1.6 billion bottles of liquid gold a year. And while some drinks don’t enjoy being away from home, like Guinness in a can, whisky travels really, really well. So even if the idea of setting foot on Islay might seem like a personal Everest, you can still experience its peaty wonder wherever you are in the world, by the bottle or by the tot.